Pollinator Dreams, savory and sweet November 4, 2009

Yo! Local peeps!

On November 14th I will be enjoying the honor of providing nibbles for my adorable farmer-visionary pals Ken and Doug’s Hudson Valley Seed Library annual Art Pack gallery show. Come on down! All details are here. I will be bringing truffles made with local ingredients (the pumpkin seed oil dudes and the beet-coriander grrls!) as well as tasty little savories made with local treasures of the squash variety. See you there!

Oh, and even if you aren’t fortunate enough to live in the H-to-the-V, you can buy Ken & Doug’s open-pollinated HV-specific seeds, packed in their gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous seed packs designed by the same lovely Sarah Snow who designed my gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous bonbon boxes and featuring the work of local artists. Browse the loveliness here.

why are my customers so rad? part two October 28, 2009

When people order large quantities of truffles, they get to pick from a long list of flavors not usually offered. Recently a sweet woman ordered 2-truffle boxes as wedding favors, and I’m so blown away the combination she created that I have to share: one fennel-apple truffle and one pumpkin seed oil truffle, snuggled up next to each other in a tiny box.

(My sweetheart took his fancy camera on tour, so I am stranded in a sea of photogenic fall scenes with only my camera phone,* thus the dreamy blurry quality of these. Maybe I should add a decent camera to my wishlist!)

How perfect for a fall wedding, right? Even a wedding-hater like me has to admit that. The apple ones are dipped in pulverized pink lady apple bits and dusted with fennel pollen,** and the pumpkin seed ones are made with deep green beautiful roasted Styrian pumpkin seed oil and garnished with slow-roasted caramelized pumpkin seeds.

Oh, the beauty.

(lest you question my packing chops [horrors], please know that these boxes were packed inside a heavily fortified bigger box.)

———–

*Speaking of: Dustin, though I have so far been too lazy to really use the others, I really really adore that Genius camera app you recommended–I use the timer function pretty much every day for outfit photos! Man, what would I do without such lovely blog reader friends?

*Hey local farmers–you could make a mint selling local fennel pollen to insane chefs like me! Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous to harvest, but the kind I buy is $30 for one ounce!

truffle movie! December 25, 2008

Veronica had the idea to make a movie of the truffle-making process to show people how crazily labor-intensive it is—so we did! Check it out (and die of cuteness, if I do say so myself!):

Lagusta’s Luscious Truffle Fabrication from lagusta’s luscious on Vimeo.

night flight to san francisco, chasing the moon across America December 17, 2008

I’m flying way past San Francisco, but that line from Angels in America came to me tonight on the plane because we’re on that same sort of endless sunset flight–all pinkness on the horizon, forever.

I’ve been flying since I was in the womb, but it never feels exactly comfortable to me, and I firmly believe this is as it should be. We weren’t born with wings, so why should launching ourselves into the atmosphere feel comfortable? Takeoffs and landings always find me clenching Jacob’s hand, sweating profusely, and closing my eyes in a vain effort at positive visualization—normally I try to picture the lovely place the flight will take me.

As soon as we are up in the air I’m fine, and I like the rhythmic nothingness of flying, the inbetween, unstressed feeling it creates.

Until the puking starts—or, used to.

In order to stave off the airsickness that has plagued me forever, I developed a little travel kit that has prevented pukiness for years now. When I was a kid I would choke down a Dramamine, which would prevent puking but would upset my stomach and make me sleep. These days my hatred and physical incapacity for swallowing pills prevents that, so a few years ago I sat down and really analyzed what this airsickness thing was all about. I realized that what makes me so sick isn’t usually the motion (unless there is a lot of turbulence), it’s the canned, vapid air. Thus, my travel kit is all about freshening up my personal air space.

When I first realized this I would eat a lemon (preferably a meyer lemon) while taking off, and I highly recommend this method. The shocking fresh tartness takes you out of the airplane world entirely. Just be sure to hide what you are doing to other passengers, otherwise they will start whispering about you. Very tragically, recently my dentist and I discovered that my obsessive love for super sour foods isn’t doing much for my teeth, and he has admonished me to try to avoid doing things like eating lemons—apparently, even brushing one’s teeth immediately after eating sour foods doesn’t do much to prevent the acidity from eating away at your teeth. So now I huff lemon and/or grapefruit essential oil, and I spray my face with a little concoction of water and lavender and lemon essential oils that I mixed up. I also take a blend of flower essences (like Rescue Remedy) that I found in Australia called Travel Remedy, and wear those sea-band things, which seem to work OK on planes and recently did nothing at all to prevent me from throwing up five times in a ferry boat ride, so who knows.

What was the point of this ramble? I seem to have forgotten. I guess that I am really happy with my little travel kit, and wanted to share it.

After LA last week I came home and Veronica and I (with lots of help from Jacob, a master box packer) pulled off the utterly unbelievable feat of making 2,000 truffles in three days, and now I am officially on vacation for a month, escaping the snow in favor of our yearly retreat to Jacob’s dad’s house on Kaua’i. The whirlwind that began two weeks before Thanksgiving is over, which is lucky because I don’t think my body could have taken one more night of 4 or 5 hours of sleep with a 18 or 19 hour workday behind and ahead of it.

Vacation! My Hawaii vacations are always working ones, because I bring loads of paperwork and recipe ideas that I’ve been saving all year, but I am not the kind of person who would take a serious month off, anyway. I’m happier doing a little work every day.

Ramble ramble ramble! Whenever I catch myself rambling I think “Would I want to read this claptrap?” because I know that writers are supposedly at their best when they write what they themselves would want to read. I love learning about the little tricks and systems people use to live their best lives, so yes. But, oh, I just remembered the original intent of this post: I wanted to chat a little about The New Yorker, so I will start a new post for that. Or maybe I will go outside and say hello to the chickens and the avocadoes and the beach, and save that for tomorrow.

in which i am relentlessly negative about things you would think i would love November 19, 2008

(Disclaimer: I am very overworked and this post is very nonsensical.)

I saw this sign in a shop called Sweeties in Northampton, Mass on November 5. I was super excited that they had so many vegan chocolates (10 or so kinds!) and I bought one of each. They were about 1/3 of the price of my chocolates, and I am 100% certain their chocolate was not organic or fair trade, and that made my heart hurt right away, but I bought them anyway out of professional curiosity and because a black dude had just become our president, and it seemed that a box of chocolates was in order (this was also how I justified spending $100 at the vintage store down the block). The nice lady at the counter said they were made by a company called [oh, I won't be that mean. I'll keep the name of the company to myself. They are in Connecticut though, I'll tell you that]. I really and truly and seriously take no pleasure in telling you this just because I am a chocolatier myself, but, um, the chocolates tasted like ass. And not like ass like you are very kinky and love the taste of ass. I mean like ass as in, well, ASS. Like brown rice syrupy ass and rancid nut ass and (completely and totally inexplicably) soy protein isolate ass.

OK, what’s up with animal rights orgs asking teeny little small businesses for insanely giant donations? I can never donate anything to Farm Sanctuary, because they are always asking for something like 100 boxes of truffles—a $1500 donation!

I do a LOT of donations. This year I was asked to donate to Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary’s ThanksLiving (groan!) event, and even though I knew Thanksgiving is my busiest week of the year, I still said yes because the truffles could be done the week before the holiday, and because I like them (I like Farm Sanctuary too, for the record, but I’ve given up even trying to donate to them). They wanted 350 truffles, packaged and ready to put in gift boxes so they could put them in gift bags to give to the attendees of the event. It’s a $437 value donation, but you’ve got to do what you can for good groups, right?

So tonight I’m making the damn truffles, watching The West Wing and thinking about how I’m doing my part to stop animal cruelty and all that crap, and I got really annoyed. What the fuck are vegan truffles that are going to be given away free to people who are almost all already vegan going to do to bring about vegan nirvana?

More specifically, since when did my activism come to include words like gift bags?

What’s happened to the animal rights movement?

When did it become all about celebrities and shoes and fucking gift bags?

Making truffles is what I do to keep The Man off my back and live a clean life. Activism is what I do to bring about a better world, and though I try very hard to ensure that my business is a part of that mission to a certain extent, tonight the intertwining of the two started to really irrirate me.

Should I stop donating chocolate to a/r groups and instead focus on actual activism? Or should I continue to donate chocolate because we still need to prove to those few non-vegan people who go to events like ThanksLiving that vegan desserts can be just as good as nonvegan ones, blah blah, and who cares about those people anyway? Such are the questions of which my days are made. I’d love to hear your thoughts, blogreaders.

That’s only part of the irritation though. Long after I agreed to donate the truffles, I found out that She Whose Name I Cannot Say Without Swearing is going to be at the event. My blood LITERALLY boils when I think about how a misogynist book like Skinny Bitch is being peddled so hardcore at animal rights people—my people! My people, selling my other people up the river. My people, who (used to?) talk big talk about interconnectedness and how animal rights gets to the root of problems like social injustice because when you have enough compassion to see how animals in our society are treated it trickles up into a more just world for everyone—is that animal rights world gone?

Because no one else seems to be screaming about it, so I guess I have to, right now, very loudly, in order to get it out of my system so that I don’t fling the damn truffles at the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary people on Thursday when I go deliver them:

TRUE PROGRESSIVES AREN’T ALLOWED TO PICK AND CHOOSE OPPRESSIONS! YOU MUST WORK TO END ALL ENTRENCHED, INGRAINED PREJUDICES IN TANDEM, BECAUSE EACH ONE—RACISM, MISOGYNY, SPIECISM, ALL THE REST—REINFORCES THE OTHERS.

In other words:

ENOUGH WITH RORY FREEDMAN! SHE IS A SACK OF SHIT AND GOOD A/R GROUPS HAVE TO STOP INVITING HER TO EVENTS. She is blatantly using body hatred in order to sneak in a vegan agenda, and I will not stand for it.

Phew. I feel so much better now.

You know what would be neat? Getting everyone to send freakass Rory Freedman copies of The Sexual Politics of Meat—like, ZILLIONS of copies. Like, BOMBARDING her with copies. Like, so many copies that she was BARRICADED IN HER HOUSE because there are so many she actually literally can’t get out her front door. That would be fucking radical.

Oh wait–the subject line of this post was about women. I was going to mention this one thing then only tangentially mention my unspeakable horror at the ick that is Rory Freedman, but instead everything got all turned around.

The one thing was: I was thinking today about my previously mentioned great love for Wanda Sykes and wondering idly for the millionth time why I am not a lesbian. Here’s what I came up with:

In general, I love women and don’t much care for men. In particular, however, I like and love my sweetheart Jacob more than anyone I’ve ever met.

Isn’t that sweet and neat and rather revolutionary and love-conquers-all-y? I mentioned it to Jacob over IM and he said: “woo! i cross genders, transgender!” Which was also pretty sweet and neat…though the more you think about it, it’s also sort of nonsensical. Which love is supposed to be, right?

Back to truffles. Thanks for letting me vent, internet.

magical internet, magical commenter, magic workweeks? November 16, 2008

WOW! All my weird feelings about blogging are completely erased—blogging is magical! Commentariat Leah has totally done me a solid–she found the mystical, magical, and heretofore mythical pink and yellow truffle cups that I have been searching for for years! Yay!!!!!! Leah, your Googling skills are wide and deep, and I am in awe. The trick seems to have been searching under alternative search terms (“petite four [sic] cups”!) that had never occurred to me. Leah’s crazy skills led to an Amazon site selling the cups. I bought all that were available, and worried that they were discontinued cups available in limited amounts. When the cups came (perfect size, perfect color, PERFECTION!) they bore the name of a website I will not give to anyone even under severest torture. This beautiful website is selling the cups as if they are a regular product, albeit in pathetic 50-cup packs. I am in talks with them vis-à-vis quantity discounts/how many they have on hand/long-term availability, etc.

But I have a good stash for now, and it is with great pleasure that I can send Leah the promised five free truffle boxes! Leah, please email me (lagusta at lagusta.com) with which boxes you’d like and I will send them out this week! (I am assuming you are a stranger Leah and not my former tenant Leah, or myself-using-my-Hebrew-name Leah, or my first grade b.f.f. [not really the last "f" though] Leah, but if you are any of these, let me know!)

In other work news, my busiest two weeks of the year are just gearing up, and I am full of energy and up for the mountain that is Thanksgiving meals and truffles. If I get a moment to catch my breath, I will show you some amazing pictures of a beet that just might give you nightmares—seriously! Watch for it!

In the meantime, though I constantly mock my slipshod hippie childhood, I sometimes can’t stop myself from believing in ultra-hippie concepts my parents instilled in me. Declaring one’s intentions to the universe in the hopes that the universe will respond is one of those bits of ridiculousness. Whenever we wanted something as kids we were directed to send out “vibes to the universe” in order to get it. It didn’t really work with things like bikes for Christmas/Hanukkah, but I have to admit that I like the idea of making your hopes and intentions public in order to scoot them a little closer to reality. I try to pretend my little notes to myself on my work chalkboard are just that, reminders to myself, but deep down I know I’m sending a message to the cosmos. Atheists can believe in the power of good vibes, right?

Let’s do it!

let’s trade! November 14, 2008

So much to blog about, yet so many opportunities to pay off student loans and mortgages this holiday season! I guess I should be an adult and forgo the former in order to rock the latter, so it might be a little quiet on the blog for a while.

Since you’ll have nothing to read, do you want to do a trade? Here’s the deal, and I’m just going to tell it like it is, OK?

I’ve had a longstanding barter relationship with a pal of mine: website work in exchange for meals and truffles. It’s worked out fairly well. She’s a great designer, but is primarily an artist. And I’m OK with that, I understand the artistic temperament, I am deeply patient. And because I am so insanely organized I know to ask her way in advance for things because, you know, artists are so insanely slow with everything. But when someone tells someone in, oh, JUNE, that they need to have a bunch of website changes made by, oh SEPTEMBER, you would think that would give said artist enough time to summon the HTML muse and get cracking, right? Apparently not. Tonight I got a text message saying my beloved barterer was on her way to India for a month to get a yoga teacher certification, and she just couldn’t get to the website. And since I have a feeling yoga-teachers-to-be are discouraged from spending their downtime squinting at code, and because I am not willing to wait another month for my changes, the barter is officially over.

Thus it is with excitement that I am announcing that I am in the market for a new barter pal! I have excellent bartering references and will lavish food, chocolate, and any combination thereof on you in exchange for top-quality websitey skillz. I don’t need anything major done—though I have dreams and hopes and wishlists for my website that we could perhaps discuss later, but what I need now are just some basic fix-ups for things I’ve screwed up with my mediocre homegrown HTML skills.

I usually do a straight trade: you tell me what you charge per hour and I give you that much in food and/or chocolates. I generally hold to the rule that no cash should change hands with barters, so any shipping and/or delivery costs that I would charge my clients and customers  will be included in the trade. It would be best if you’re in the NYC or upstate NY area so you could get meal deliveries, but if you’re a giant chocolate lover and want to do the trade in exchange for a huge amount of truffles (and in January I will be rolling out a new chocolate line, don’t forget!) you can be anywhere in these here states of the union.

If you are interested, send me an email (lagusta at lagusta dot com) and be sure to include links to sites you’ve done. Not to be snobby, but only top-quality website-makers need apply! In an ideal world you would be a vegan lady who is super reliable, but really anyone who is not flaky would work out just great.

Forward freely!

the pink box: promo email November 11, 2008

Hello, organic and fair-trade truffle lovers! Happy America! Well, here it is, our newest baby: the Pink Box! Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. Originally this was going to be the Hudson Valley Box and it was going to contain truffles made with local ingredients from our neighborhood, the Hudson Valley of New York. But once we paired our brand new local-beet truffle with our brand new local-apple truffle, we couldn’t resist adding our bestselling, beloved (albeit not particularly local) pomegranate truffle with a rose petal garnish to the box — and the Pink Box was born. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I think you’re going to adore it, just like we do. Here are the details on the new box: 3 Fennel-Apple truffles: Freshly-ground fennel seeds are combined with fennel pollen (what’s fennel pollen?) and local apple brandy and rolled in pulverized organic apples grown by my friend, sweet farmer Billiam at Liberty View Farm. 3 Coriander-Beet truffles: It’s not weird, I promise! A coriander-flavored interior is rolled in pulverized organic beets grown with care right down the road from our kitchen by my farmer pal Jessica. 2 Pomegranate truffles: With rose petal garnish. A little tartness compliments the chocolate nicely – this one is a flavor bomb. Click here to order The Pink Box! Oh, and don’t forget about our new and improved ginger truffle! She’s all grown up into Ms. Ginger-Lime with the addition of delicious lime oil and organic lime zest. Check her out in the Wild Box. Yours in mind-blowing chocolate, Lagusta

What’s a lemon truffle to do? (A contest!) October 15, 2008

Like me, but smaller!

No one believes me when I tell them this, so I’m telling the entire world and daring someone to prove me wrong:

No one in the world makes 1″ pale pink truffle cups or 1″ pale yellow truffle cups.

My lemon truffles, in their sad little white cups, are weeping, I tell you. They keep asking to be put in a yellow cup, like a proper lemon truffle should be. And the almond truffles, they would like a pale pink cup that reflects their faintly pink inner flesh. Why must the world deny these poor truffles their rightful clothing?

I consider myself a pretty good Googler, but I’ve been Googling and calling every candy packaging company in the country for a good 4 years now, and I am telling you the truth here, people: there is a worldwide pink and yellow candy cup shortage! What are Obama and McKinney’s stances on this most pressing issue, I wonder? A President who promised to end this shameful deficit of appropriate candy cups would have my vote, for sure.

If you can prove me wrong and find me a good source for cups, I will gladly send you FIVE BOXES OF FREE TRUFFLES, flavor assortments of your choice (8-truffle boxes). This is a $75 value!

The rules:

-I don’t want foil cups. I can find those. I use them, but I don’t love them.

-They have to be 1″ (I believe the truffle cup industry calls these #4 size).

-They have to be in stock and available to order. I have found several sites that show them, but they have been out of stock for years.

-Don’t even try to play me by sending me links to Valentine’s Day heart cups!

-I know all about the tulip cups. They are cute, and yellow, but you and I both know they are not a truffle cup. They are too big, anyway.

-Don’t even suggest that I make my own unless you have an easy way all worked out that will take less than a minute to make a zillion!

I’ll even get you started with a few search terms to use: candy cups, truffle cups, candy packaging, baking cups.

Go forth and Google!

the closer the election gets, the more i think about chocolate October 15, 2008

Here’s a bit of inside information for LL truffle-lovers: I’m going to be discontinuing the Boozy Box assortment soon, and will be replacing it with a new super special assortment that I believe you will adore (are beets involved? YES!). The boozy truffles (Coconut-Rum, Port-Walnut, Kahlúa, and Double Chocolate) are all really nice, but it gets ordered in much smaller quantities than the other assortments, and often people request not to get the alcoholic truffles when they buy the big mixed assortment box of 28 truffles.

With a limited amount of time on this planet and approximately one zillion truffle flavors I want to make, I don’t see why I should keep selling flavors that people don’t utterly adore, so bye bye boozy. But I am fascinated that people don’t order them, so if you’re one of those people (or have an idea about why others don’t like them), would you mind sharing your reasons? I figure it’s one of four reasons:

1) You’re in AA and they tell you to avoid even the tiniest amounts of alcohol. I respect that, but man, what’s with all the lushes who love my truffles?

2) You’re straight edge, or formerly straight edge but still try not to drink. If so, hooray for me for having so many straight edge customers!

3) You think they won’t taste good (and in that case I have to quibble with you, because they are really special and lovely) or you don’t like the taste of alcohol generally, or the flavor of coffee specifically and don’t want the Kahlúa truffle because it comes with a coffee bean on top (I don’t like coffee either, but that truffle converted me to Kahlúa, for sure). Or, you still don’t think Kahlúa is vegan even though I say right on the site that I wrote to the company and got their assurances that it is.

5) You’re not straight edge per se, but try to avoid supporting the companies that produce most of the alcohol commonly available for political reasons.

Other ideas?

Oh, and if you happen to adore the boozy box flavors, there is some consolation: the Port-Walnut is still available in the Nutty Box, and if you want 28 of the same flavor, you can order the Big Assortment Box and just write in the message box in PayPal that you want a discontinued flavor like Coconut-Rum or Kahlúa (or miso, wasabi, mint, anise, or any of the trillion other discontinued flavors you might long for). This little deal only works if you want an entire big box of just one flavor, please note!